Something Wicked This Way Comes
(Written by
@TenfoldShields with my approval)
A God journeyed here once, a wolf shaped like Winter, whose howl was the bloody-throated Northern winds and whose teeth were silver starlight. A God was born here once, a golden-haired child whose coming was marked by a twin-tailed comet , a babe delivered beneath the shadowed boughs of the Reikwald. They came to this land of darkling forests and and wild moors. Of white-capped rivers that roared and raged like ill-bound dragons and jagged, ragged mountain ranges with peaks suit to score the sky. And what did they find here, in this ocean of trees? What did they find, entombed in their own fossils, sleeping in the soil. Latent and lambent, like a fire kindled low, a slow smolder in a vein of peat.
This is the joke. The great, cosmic jest. The punchline more than two thousand years in the making, because Gods brought men brought Gods, but when they finally arrived to this would-be Empire-
The darkness was already here, waiting for them. Above all else, before all others, this has always been a land of monsters.
A Harvest of Souls
Chancellor Frederick von Schaffernorscht was not, it should be noted, a good man precisely. His interests were a merchant's interests, the clink of coin and black ink marked on an iron-bound ledger. His wares the unstrung muscle and drying sinew of empire; the visceral guts of Sigmar's land and state salted and packed away in airtight casks for unromantic resale to the highest bidder. But he was a pious man and he was a prudent man and in the end those are much the same. Over his two decades of service he had brought the League prosperity, lasting peace, and spent Ostermark lives like a miser painstakingly counting out shiny, coppery pennies from his palm. And while it was hard, perhaps, for the people to love a man like that, it was harder still to despise him. The Chancellor was a known quantity, a calculated sum, unchanging and irreducible. And in that could be found the precious quality of stability. Of surety and security.
The year before the Chancellor had ordered a comprehensive audit of the League's lands, a full inventory of their territory and possessions and a rough census of their citizenry. Ambitious to be sure, but his advisers and agents were well accustomed to such administrative undertakings, and armed cadres fanned out in every direction. Working, toiling through the Spring and Summer seasons, the first reports returning by mid-Autumn. The full accounting in place by the time the last leaves had fallen and the roofs of the capital groaned under the weight of fresh-fallen snow.
And it immediately became clear that something was very, very wrong.
A small string of villages and hamlets had had record yields. Storehouses all but bursting with fresh-milled grain, basements packed full of hardy tubers, smokehouses stacked to the eaves with thick slabs of rich, fatty pork. A cause for celebration it would seem! Surplus food was surplus coin, and there was no shortage of buyers to the South, among the forces of the besieged van Hel, the weary Count Luciano, or, indeed, van Hel's besiegers themselves. At the very least well fed peasants tended to be peaceable peasants and that, on its own, was a blessing. The issue was simply one of...location. For these villages lay between cursed, unhallowed Mordheim and the desolate country of Slyvania. And though he pored over old records and cracked parchment from decades past, the Chancellor and his aides could find no cause for such growth, precedent for such a bounty, anywhere in the region's history. Doubt became deep unease. Unease became suspicion.
The subsequent investigation was subtle: traders who were no such thing, would-be woodsman with false-smiles and keen eyes. Even to seemingly innocuous outsiders the village elders remained tight-lipped, the taverns raucous and joyful but quick to attribute their personal miracle to Taal or Rhya or simple good fortune. But there were those whose teeth ground in frustrated silence and with a deft hand and a sympathetic ear they were all-too eager to unburden themselves, tell of their own sorrows and bitter recriminations. The young father whose babe would have been a year old if it hadn't been delivered overripe and tumorous, tearing out its mothers guts with its passage ("but they promised us, they promised us, and Bachmeier's own boys were born plump and with heads full of golden hair! Twins! And they- it was the same woman who did us both, and she
promised"). The young mother whose daughter had hid in the wheat-field as part of some childish game, sought by her friends ("All those little ones found was her arm on the side of the road, the stump still ragged-red. It was the crops, even my own pa says its mad but I know, I know, it was that fecking
field").
The events that ensued unfolded rapidly. Frantic missives to the provincial capital, a hushed muster of the Chancellor's own guard, and a letter sent South. Answered with all swiftness, in all fullness and so it was, that and on one rainy day in late Summer, two women and a man with wide-brimmed hats and travelworn coats walked into the village at the head of a small column of armored men.
The witch-hunters were here.
Shackled jaws were broken wide, village secrets spilled out into the dust pyres roared and fields bled thick black smoke into the leaden sky. The hedge-folk had come through here last year, bringing blessings and good fortune in return for silence. And they
worked, so the villagers had held true and counted the odd aberration, the incidental disappearance or illness or small, hushed tragedy the cost of doing business.
As if the risk to one's immortal soul could be put on a set of merchant's scales, as if such wild powers could be bartered and brokered with; trusted not to turn in your hand. Foolish.
The villages and their elders were fed to purifying flame. The tainted land reaped by the inferno and at the end all that was left was a string of gutted ruins and a much reduced population of peasant farmers, swiftly relocated to nearby settlements, dispersed from this blighted place with what few possessions they could carry. Harsh measures to be sure, even heartless it might seem; but swift action had doubtlessly spared the Chancellor some later calamity, and the incidences of corruption, however sporadic, were obvious. The nobles of Ostermark lauded von Schaffernorscht for his decisive action and relations with the clergy of Sigmar's Cult notably warmed. The witch-hunters themselves (mercifully) were uninterested in popular praise or general acclaim, instead moving on shortly thereafter.
Following the trail of their new quarry South.
Encroacher
Understand: this world does not belong to you, you are an ant crawling upon the bleak bones of long forgotten giants; you count a single rib as half your world's span and think yourself great for surmounting it. Understand: you were not born to live, you were not born to die, your existence is an accident of natural science and high theology, you are a lie that persists for no other reason than that it knows no other way and when, at last, the last air leaves your lungs and the lie-that-is-you ceases to be this world will not miss you. Understand: this world does not belong to you, it is the province of a history vaster and more alien than you could ever know. A darkness deeper than you could ever fathom.
And in the West and in the North, men and women set forth to push it back, even so.
In Marienburg Elector Count Yjsbraant declared that he would wage war upon the swamps that surrounded his great city, his realm of canals and customs houses and sleek-hulled ships, and so he set forth. With armies of engineers and laborers and somewhat perplexed Bretonnians peasants who had been politely kidnapped from the South and
very perplexed Norscans who had been all but
invited from the North, he marched. With the cult of Manaan in the vanguard and a fleet of shallow-bottomed barges and lashed-together platforms in the train.
Dams and shrines were raised. Stagnant, brackish swamps were drained, baring wet, loamy soil. The fiercely independent fen-dwellers were less subjugated and more
flattened by the behemoth that came bulling through their world of dark greenery and slow waters; spat out in its wake, blinking at their new docks, their new temple, their new faith, and their new, equally bemused, neighbors. Not precisely sure what, exactly, had happened only that it had been very fast and involved a tremendous amount of thickly accented Reikspiel. And the Kindly Grandmother who lived in the low-stilt house on the edges of their floating town, who sometimes brewed potions and sometimes cast curses and kept all manner of strange plants in her garden had been summarily declared mayor. Apparently.
The problems didn't begin until they found the Carcass. Oh there had been fighting, there were some soon-to-be-reincorporated subjects who resisted, there were goblins and ghasts and witchlight in the swamps. The odd bouts sickness and killing pneumonia but all within the accepted bounds of Yjsbraant's tallymen.
But this was different. The work crews had found the village abandoned, the greenwood platforms drifting on the sluggish currents and thought little of it, not every village stayed to fight after all, plenty simply dispersed into the surrounding wilds ahead of the juggernaut column.
They didn't find the bodies until they began draining the marsh. They didn't find
the body until they began to channel and wall and wick the waters away. The Carcass was a massive thing. An ancient and antediluvian thing, eel-and-squid-and-whale tangled together, wrapped in glossy-slick black flesh; washed ashore long before Sigmar was ever born or- no, no some speculated. Perhaps it had always been here, it was speculated in Altdorf and Marienburg that the Westerlands were once submerged in their entirety. These lands once the bed of a greatly expanded ocean. Perhaps this was a beast that had once dwelled here.
But then why the villagers? All perfectly preserved even so long submerged, everyone from the eldest grandmother to the youngest child, the skin over their spines split, neatly slit, their backbones missing. The work crews called for a priest and buried the bodies as best they could though they lacked the materials to even begin covering the Carcass and its rubbery flesh would not catch fire, reports to the area's factors and overseers were uneasy initially. Filled with carefully couched language, a rational man trying to disperse irrational fears. Over the months of labor and toil they began to degrade, speaking of unclarified "difficulties" in construction. Of uncertain "obstacles" that had been encountered.
And then, four weeks into Autumn, reports ceased utterly. Work, already behind schedule, seemed to have stalled entirely. An inspector was hurriedly dispatched along with a cadre of guards. When he returned alone, some days later, he spoke but six words.
"Everything is as it should be."
Before opening his own throat with a dagger in the factor's office.
In Salzenmund Elector Countess Jana von Moltke studied her maps of the Forest of Shadows, secondhand reports from the White Wolves who had been attached to last year's Drakwald campaign sitting in neat stacks by her hand. The operations in the South had been conservative in strategic scope but had benefitted massively from the deep well of manpower and capital the lords of Middleland and Middenheim and their allies had to allocate to their task. And even then there had been frequent complications, clashes and violence, unexpected developments and moments where the entire campaign had nearly been thrown into complete chaos.
She had perhaps a half of their forces, a sliver of their combined funds, and a swathe of forest every bit as deadly and dangerous at her door. And while she could count on the assistance of Middenheim, of the Ar-Ulric himself and his armored plait-bearded Wolves, her own goals would have to be similarly constrained.
They embarked at the start of Summer, when the days were at their longest, the sun at its warmest. When the near omnipresent snows had at last melted everywhere save for in the deepest shadows, and the meadows and woods had given way to tentative green growth. Jana herself at the head of the mustered army, side by side with Ulric's own high priest, Kriestov himself; his mere presence (to say nothing of his generosity) a minor miracle in its own right. Local woodsmen returning every half a dozen hours to give short, terse reports before vanishing into the brush once more.
It didn't take long for them to encounter the undead.
In the dark and lonely corners of the Old World the vanished, so often, do not stay at rest, do not remain at ease. The missing and disappeared, the remnants of all those the Shadows have swallowed are not gone, they are only sleeping. Lightly, fitfully, stirred easily at the first sound of footfalls. They came in a gradual trickle at first, bones and grey flesh still coated in rime, teeth yellowed and nails ragged. The rivulets slowly swelling into a river, then a flood. Without a necromancer to command them, without a guiding intelligence behind them, the revenants were more animalistic than antagonistic. Hungry beasts searching for something sweet, something red, something visceral-hot that could warm their blackened, necrotic guts. Their movements almost tidal, washing against the Nordlandic forces like waves and ultimately weathered as such.
The campaign those short, Summer months became a thing of macabre rote, of grisly repetition. There was no malign intellect to oppose them, no wicked gleam from the depths of the forest. Only the hoarse shouts of men in formation, only the screech of skeletal fingers raking on plate and the silver shine of Crow-Feeder in the twilight beneath the boughs.
When at last the withdrew, their mission, such as it was, completed Jana's forces took solace in what they had enabled, measured success by what few scraps had been reclaimed. Walled villages had risen where once only the forest had stood and they were stout enough to weather the Winter. The Wolf-Road that bound the provincial capital to the Ulricsberg, long in disrepair, had been stitched together at last. New stones laid, intrusive growth cleared, and watch-towers and forts erected. Their Baroness's esteem raised in the eyes of Ulric's most devout (albeit in their own grudging, taciturn, near-Dawi way).
It was enough.
It would have to be enough.
Gig Economy
Sylvania! What is there to say about that wicked den of sin and suffering that has not already been said? It is a place of storybook stuff, childhood nightmares writ large across the land. The dreamy unreality of its mist-wreathed wetlands, its skeletal forests and high crags a sort of salve to the mind. A way to numb the constant, background ache that yes- yes this was really happening. Yes you were truly here. Yes this was your lot, your life, and this was all it would ever be. Sylvania, where the shadows reach forth with ragged claws! Sylvania, where even the soil drinks oceans of blood!
Sylvania, may Ulric damn this place and Sigmar strike it from the face of the known world.
Waldenhof was the closest thing to a proper capital the province had, the only place in the region where one could approximate the bustle and churn of a Southern metropolis. Even if the houses were narrow, somber things made of dark timber and cold stone, dressed in flaking paint. Even if the streets ran slender and crooked and every empty window seemed an empty eye socket, every alleyway a yawning fissure with shadows suit to swallow you whole. Even if, when you closed your eyes and listened to the wind moan and the frigid, needle-like rain patter on the shingles of your home, it was hard to shake the feeling that the walled city was more a giant's corpse, hollowed out and half-harvested, than any place men were meant to live.
Still, one becomes accustomed. Life, such as it is, goes on.
The people of Waldenhof paid precious little attention to the small convoys that came once a month, then twice or trice. There was war in greater Stirland and every twist and turn of fortunes, every secondhand tale of valor and might made for wonderful entertainment. There was the Count's own duel looming on the horizon, more immediate in ramifications even if much reduced in scope than the monstrous ballet of armored formations and artillery to the West. And then, of course, there was the Reiklander opera house and the bewildered fascination regarding everything from the proposed plans to the new, risque, Altdorfian fashions it brought.
And so the convoys became something of a fixture, background noise in a suddenly almost-thriving province. Those that noticed, by and large, knew better than to say anything. The hard-faced men and women who came with the convoys were free enough with their coin and booze and, really, what concern of it was theirs? And so like clockwork it continued. The convoys came, a mix of humans and halflings under the supervision of a few, increasingly familiar faces. They stopped in Waldenhof to resupply before proceeding into the province's interior; returning a few days later with less men and chained, metal boxes stacked neatly in the back of their wagons.
Bound somewhere to the West, in the Stirlish heartland.
The Duke's Alchemists
This is the paradox of a city under siege, under blockade, of thousands of people penned up behind their own walls for their own safety: boredom becomes as much of a threat as violence. Boredom creates a kind of desperation, an inchoate desire for release, for distraction. Boredom gives people all the time and energy they could possibly need to chew over old hurts, old slights, to brood and ruminate and pick at half-healed scabs purely for the sake of something to do, for the
feeling of some catharsis. Men and women get drunk to make the treacly slow minutes crawl along a little faster. Men and women get stupid, looking for something to fill the empty days.
And all during that long, hot Summer the people of Carroburg stewed in their boredom. Soaked in the endless nothing, sluggish winds scarcely stirring the heavy pallor of tension and tedium that had settled over the city. Even though Reikland's Grand Prince had ordered his Lord High Admiral to heel, Schieffen-Kassel striking his sails and withdrawing, everyone knew -everyone
knew- that Altdorf's own armada was out there lurking. Waiting just out of sight to descend at a whim and without warning- and then the Lord Regent filled the Reik with piratical scum regardless so what was the point really? Their main artery, connecting the urban sprawl to the rest of Middleland, to the rest of the Empire, was unsafe. The roads through the Drakwald were- well, roads through the Drakwald and dangerous by nature. The steady flow of food-stuffs, trade-goods, and construction materials became unreliable, intermittent. And then there was the incident with the High Priest and the ruins of Goldgather's palace to ratchet up the ambient strain another few notches, on top of playing host to the Regent's soldiers and...
Well.
Nothing like a good old fashioned riot to break the monotony no? Maybe tear the Duke apart in the streets while they were at it.
Salvation mercifully came before the "torches, makeshift mauls, gutters running red with the blood of the burgher and the noble alike" stage, from an admittedly unlikely source: amidst the fallout of the Drakwald purges the preceding year, Duke Henryk had struck up an odd friendship with the Alchemist von Hohenheim, offering to host him and his guild within Carroburg. And von Hohenheim was nothing if not a gracious (and exceedingly grateful) guest. Tapping his order's carefully hoarded resources in service to the twin goods of "ingratiating himself with the Duke" and "not being strung up by the dockside by Middlelanders".
The Alchemist's Fair, as it came to be called, was a tremendous success in both respects. Brightly colored kites borne on artificial breezes, free food and free
beer, a truly spectacular stage-play complete with beautifully painted marionette-wolves and a complicated puppet-dragon that breathed colorful flame (the whole plot only
somewhat shamelessly catering to the egos of the increasingly independent Drakwalders at the noted expense of Middenheim and the Reikland). The chatter and gossip in the aftermath lingered for weeks, and for once, for once, the tenor was less about how these obscene witches should be burned at the stake and more curiosity at the new, elaborate Guildhall under construction on the higher slopes of the city. More mulling over the many and varied opportunities for business these- not magicians, no clearly not, but
craftsmen offered, especially since their Grandmaster was fast becoming a regular presence at Duke Henryk's councils. And the Duke's own liveried men were often seen at their side, grim-faced bodyguards who would brook no assault on their charges. Not from Carroburg's increasingly acclimated population. And not from the Regent's and Ar-Ulric's soldiers.
Reports of this shift would soon reach the ears of both devout Ulricans, simmering with bitterness, with barely hidden contempt and outright disgust. That the Duke would welcome such vile serpents not only into his home but into his
confidences, while they, noble wolves one and all, were tasked to defend his hearth and his home? Defend this city that balked more and more at their mere presence (and here, more than a few missives speculated darkly at these clear signs of corruption)?
How was such a thing to be tolerated?
How could such a thing be borne without a response?
Swineherd
A heavy pall lay over the Moot in the summer of 2202. A feeling like the humidity, the weight in the air before a storm breaks, the tension slow-building, slow-brewing over the long, hot months without a clear source or end in sight. Things were, on the surface, the best they had been in a long time. Count Francis Ludwig had been good to the merchants and farmers of the Moot, van Hel, their ostensible overlord, was thoroughly distracted and what power her office held over them well and truly disrupted, and the inheritances of however many dozens of sneering Stirlish lords now lined their buried vaults. Gold flowed fast and free, and even as drought set in across so much of the Southern Empire, even as piracy plagued the River Reik and war tore Stirland itself asunder, the Moot had peace. Prosperity. Plentiful drink and cellars full of hearty food.
And yet it was almost impossible to shake the feelings of deep unease. Thunderheads piled up high on the horizon, vast black ramparts of clouds building over Sylvania and sweeping in from Ostermark, but the rain never came to the Moot. For weeks and weeks on end the sky remained an eternal blue, an azure so deep, so pure it almost hurt. The sun a great lidless, golden eye. Flies buzzed, fat and sluggish, and families gorged themselves at parties and village feasts for want of anything better to do. Elder Greentoe had a new guest at his sprawling manor, an unpleasant man who wore all-concealing grey robes and a thick white coat beneath despite the heat, whose high pitched laugh couldn't help but set the hackles back and the bones shivering. And even the many and wonderful mechanical trinkets he brought couldn't soothe the jangled nerves. A prominent farmer butchered her husband and all their children around Midsummer, when their neighbors ran to fetch the Watch, hearing screams and fearing bandits or more riverine pirates, they found her in her best silks. Standing but still dwarfed by the bulk of the massive, still breathing sow she had slit from throat to groin, humming as she cradled a pallid, sluglike piglet in her arms.
It was a mercy when the rains finally came in late Autumn. When months of dryness broke all at once, giving way to three days of deluge, a torrential downpour fit to drown the world. Sheets of water falling so fast, so thick, that the Reik's tributaries nearly burst their banks and a man at noon couldn't see his hand before his face, couldn't breathe but for drowning on his own front porch. It happened then, in the middle of the tempest. Outside an inconsequential little hamlet, its only features of distinction a lovingly maintained apple orchard which produced the region's second-finest ciders, and a circle of ancient standing stones on a hill a half-mile away. The monolithic slabs worn down to all but shapeless nubs by the passage of centuries.
A cascade of multicolored lightning. First one bolt. Then three. Then a dozen. Then so many, so fast, it was as if a jagged column of light bound the heavens to the earth and refused to let either go. Until it was as if the endless roar of thunder was a single, deafening howl, rising to a wordless
scream before ceasing all at once.
After, when the storm stopped and the village elder, a thick stump of a man puffing endlessly on his pipe, got together a party to go poke at the hill they found a great, glassy scar. A scorched, perfect circle between the stones where the grass had been seared away, the soil melted into slag. And then, descending the hillside, more than a dozen pairs of footprints. Met by a caravan's worth of people, the wheeled tracks in the mud not yet completely eroded.
A small army of strangers, come and gone in the night with no explanation.
Reliquary
The shepherd's cot was a small thing, a humble thing, a two-story affair built into a hillside; the interior a single open space, the roof covered in sod. The old witch-hunter sitting at the table as the man poured her a sympathetic cup of tea. Hers had been a difficult season, following ever more tenuous, ever more uncertain leads as to the whereabouts of the now-Venerated Soul Martin of Stirland, doing her due diligence as she had been ordered, as she had been trained. Even as the actual ramifications became ever more unimportant: Wurtbad was under siege, the Countess had been cleared for all the good it would do her, Stirland itself was falling apart and there was word, from her compatriots in Ostermark of terrible plots afoot. And yet here she was, following shepherd's tales to the end of the Empire simply so her superiors could say that their duty had been done.
The sunlight that filtered in through the shuttered windows was honey-gold. The man understood as she spoke, and was not unkind. When at last she fell silent he gave her an answer of a kind, talking to her of...things, things that she could not quite recall, that nevertheless filled her with a sense of warmth, matched by the simple-if-excellent tea her host had offered.
Daylight was fading and they still had far to travel. The man understood and wished her well. The old witch-hunter stepped across the threshold and turned, a second later, a thought catching her by the elbow; she had not offered the old man thanks for his generosity, she had not even so much as asked his name.
There was no shepherd's cot behind her.
There was no old man within.
There was no hill.
Just an expanse of desolate, windswept moors, stretching out to eternity in every direction; feathered with heath and long grass, broken by crags. And, not ten paces away, the man's cloak. Wrapped around a set of bleached white fingerbones, the ivory white seeming to bleed a soft honey-gold.
Wearing the signet ring of Saint Martin about the knuckle.
